Husbands

Famous quotes containing the word husbands:

    Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they were themselves too diffident and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman; for a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother. They preferred themselves to suffer the misery of celibacy, rather than risk the other person.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Back now to autumn, leaving the ended husk
    Of summer that brought them here for Show Saturday
    The men with hunters, dog-breeding wool-defined women,
    Children all saddle-swank, mugfaced middleaged wives
    Glaring at jellies, husbands on leave from the garden
    Watchful as weasels, car-tuning curt-haired sons
    Back now, all of them, to their local lives....
    Philip Larkin (1922–1986)